


Mismatch Miracle

by diamonddaydream



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Falling In Love, First Kiss, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Height Differences, Hogwarts, Hogwarts Eighth Year, Home, Marriage Proposal, One Shot, Post-Hogwarts, Post-War, Romantic Draco Malfoy, Romantic Fluff, Short & Sweet, Sweet, Tall Draco Malfoy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-03
Updated: 2020-06-03
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:08:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24523609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/diamonddaydream/pseuds/diamonddaydream
Summary: For Dramione Height Difference Mini-fest 2020. Hermione Granger always seems to make the first move, but only because Draco Malfoy is always already there.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy
Comments: 60
Kudos: 395
Collections: Dramione Height Difference  2020





	Mismatch Miracle

It wasn’t just him. Hermione Granger stood closer to tall people than she did to everyone else. She never thought about it, but it was true. Tall people's faces were high enough to be out of her space -- the distance moving up, not out -- so she could come close without smelling their breath, seeing their teeth, the spots on their noses. Short people stand close to tall people. 

It wasn’t just true between Hermione and Draco.

It was because of him that she hopped up on the library step-stool to get the book herself instead of asking him to hand it down to her. She might have asked it of someone else, but not him. By then, asking him for anything felt risky. It was a crack, an opening, prompting him to look down, half of his mouth curving into a dangerous grin. 

“What is it you need, Granger?”

No, none of that. Not between them. The risk was becoming impossible to ignore.

But if she summoned the book with him standing so close to where it was shelved, it might have struck him in the head, provoking a yowl, an onslaught of questions, accusations, so she used the step-stool to reach it. That was exactly why these stools were scattered throughout the stacks.

It wasn’t like he wasn’t still taller than her after she stepped up. Her eyes were level with his nose instead of his chest. He could see into her face, note the changes in the teeth he’d once hexed, count every freckle on her nose if he cared to, inhale the scent of her, in the same way she was taking in the smell throbbing off the pulse points of his throat. 

She knew then, at last, how close they had been standing, all the time. 

“Got it,” she said, stepping down with the book. 

It was too late. The closeness had been revealed. Neither of them could unknow it.

\-----------------------------

It’s not like she’d had anything to drink herself that night, at the party in the eighth year common room where the grown boys were showing off, performing feats of strength, no magic allowed, only testosterone. There was arm wrestling, leg wrestling, and lifting each other off the ground. Draco was sober too, arriving late, following her inside, setting a stack of books on a desk, dark eyebrows raised at the pandemonium.

“Oh, give over, all of you,” she called, standing with her fists on her hips, addressing a pile of boys who’d just toppled over trying to see how many of them could climb onto Gregory Goyle’s back before he collapsed. “Raising a load isn’t about strength. It’s about smarts, understanding leverage and physics.”

The pile writhed, groaning from their fall, but laughing at each other, at her.

Seamus Finnegan’s face emerged out of the tangle of arms and legs. “Prove it, Hermione,” he said. “Show us this savage leverage then. How many of us can you carry on your own back?”

She tossed her head. “That is not a very sophisticated test.”

Seamus was getting to his feet. “Quit throwing shapes and show us. Start with a big man. Give old Goyle a chance to catch his breath then -- “

She interrupted with a loud huff. “I won’t have some hulking drunk pawing at me -- “

“Fine, then use Malfoy,” Seamus said. “He’s nothing like hammered yet. You've just come in, haven’t you Malfoy? Right. Up on Hermione’s back and she’ll walk you once around the room that way.”

The crowd was chanting, clapping. “Gran-ger, Gran-ger, Gran-ger.”

Draco laughed toward his feet. “How about I carry her around the room instead?” he offered.

There was a howling of boos. 

Hermione raised her arms, calling for silence. “Leverage!” she said. She turned her back to Draco, her arms raised like stirrups as she stooped in front of him. “Right. Malfoy, hold onto my shoulders -- “

“Right.”

“Tightly now. And then I lean slightly forward -- “

“Right.”

“Using my weight and natural gravity as a counter balance.”

“Wait, what?”

“And now, Malfoy, if you please, lift your feet off the floor. I’ll catch them.”

“Granger, that’s never going to work.”

“Trust me. It’s all in the physics. With my centre of gravity properly aligned, it’s perfectly -- “

Her voice disappeared into a high yelp. Draco had lifted his feet, exactly as she’d asked, but the instant he did, the pair of them flew backward, her weight nothing like a sufficient counter balance for his. They plummeted in the direction his weight pulled them, Draco landing on his back on the rug, his arms still around Hermione’s neck and shoulders, clenched as if to protect her from the impact with his body laid out beneath her. She lay on his chest, face up, blinking at the ceiling, speechless, unsure what had happened.

The laughter in the room was deafening.

As soon as she was reoriented, Hermione sat up quickly, crushing Draco’s lap as she did so, leaving him groaning and wincing, rolling onto his side.

Seamus was stumbling toward them, still choking on his laughter, pulling on Draco’s arm to shift him to sitting. Hermione looked back at them, at the tempered smirk on Draco’s face as he smoothed his hair. 

There was tremendous force in the gravity about him which she hadn’t understood. It was stronger, she was mired deeper in its pull than she had known, and now she was not able to tip and bend herself out of it.

\--------------

The first time Hermione kissed him, Draco was sitting on the guardrail on a wooded path along a ravine on the grounds of her university. After a summer of exchanging letters, he had appeared here, on her birthday, a face she knew in a town where she knew no one, a face she missed. 

From sitting, his head was low enough that when he took her hand and led her to stand between his knees, a simple boost onto her tiptoes brought her near enough to press her cheek to his, to draw back, her skin moving over his with slow, warm friction that made his eyelids drift shut. He held his breath as her lips moved over the edge of his.

“Your mouth,” she said as he parted his lips and turned toward hers. “Everything about you -- you're made on a different scale than me. I can only cover half of your mouth with mine. Maybe just a third.”

For a moment, she was a little sad, a sad little, wondering if she should press this measuring of her mouth against his into a full kiss. He seemed to be waiting for it, inviting it as his lips tugged with faint, gentle pressure at hers as they moved with her speech.

He would accept it for now -- but would it be enough for always? 

It was too late again. The “th” of the word “third” had brought her tongue to the front of her mouth when she'd spoken it, wet against his lips. At the touch, his tender invitation became insistent, his mouth breaking open, taking her in, joining himself to her so thoroughly that the dimensions and limits of her mouth and his didn’t make sense anymore. She couldn’t speak, could only cling to him, her arms inside his jacket as he folded her inside it with him. 

He didn’t lean away until he had an answer for her. “If you can only cover a third, it means you must always kiss me three times more, and three times more passionately than you’ve ever kissed anyone else.”

She blinked slowly, like a cat. “Only three times more?”

“Three thousand times. Three trillion. Just -- never stop.”

\---------------------

It wasn't like there was anyone else she wanted as her first house guest when she finished university, started working, and moved into a flat of her own.

“Bit big, isn’t it?” Draco asked, draping himself over her shoulders from behind as she flicked on the lights with her wand. He growled into her ear, “But then you’ve always been a bad judge of size.”

She led him further inside, nudging him to sit on the second-hand sofa, taking her usual place, sitting in his lap. “About that,” she said. “I know the living arrangements here are not at all what you’re used to, not a manor house, but even so -- would you live here with me? Together?”

He smiled, but sighed. “You always make the first move, Granger -- “

She shook her head. “No, it just feels that way because you’re always much closer, more massive, on a different scale than I thought. Yes, I’m a bad judge of size. I reckon you are too. We think I’m making moves but you’re always already here. There’s never, as they say in romance novels, a distance to close. Not between us.”

“And it’s going to be that way again now,” he said. “I don’t want to be your live-in boyfriend. I’m closer than that, even if you haven’t noticed yet. I want to live here as your husband.”

“Draco -- “

“This isn’t a proposal, not yet. Think of it more like a confession.” He hung his head. “Look, I gave up most everything my family raised me to believe and I did it gladly. What they taught me was vile, inexcusable. But my parents' marriage -- it was their saving grace. In this one way, I’d like you to see things from my point of view, and don’t ask me to live with you until you mean for me to stay forever.”

She still sat in his lap, but her posture was stiff and upright. “Draco, I’m not saying ‘no,’ I’m just asking ‘why.’ I don’t see -- ”

“Right, you don’t see,” he said, slipping out from beneath her, standing up. “So let me show you. Hop on my back.”

She laughed.

“Come on, Hermione,” he said, taking her hand. “I want you to see what our lives look like from my point of view. Literally. So I’ll be needing your eye-level at mine.”

She sighed but stood up on the sofa, locking her arms around his neck and her knees around his waist. 

He took her to the kitchen first. “This is what the cooker looks like from up here?” she snickered. “It’s so far away. No wonder you can’t cook.”

He scoffed. “That is not what I meant. I cook fine and -- oh, leave it,” he said, spinning around. “Look at this.”

She could see the top of the refrigerator -- the bulk mail she’d tucked up there to get it out of her sight, but which was plainly in his sight. “Oh,” she said. “And in a few months, when it gets dusty up there -- “

“I’ll be the first to know, yes,” he said.

Their next stop was the bathroom. “This is how far I have to bend down to rinse my face when I shave.” He leaned over, causing her to squeal as she tipped forward, over his shoulders.

“See? It’s not easy,” he laughed as he righted them.

He stepped into the dry bathtub. “And when I shower anywhere but at home, I need to duck to get into the stream of water.”

She cooed into his ear. “Poor wet, disrobed Draco.”

“Not nearly wet enough.”

They were back in the lounge, looking out the window, down toward the street. Her hold on his shoulders tightened. There was no way for them to fall but she wasn’t used to the high-rise view yet, especially from his height, and it still unnerved her. “This is why you’ve never been afraid to fly, isn’t it?” she said. “Because you’re up so high already.”

He smirked. “Maybe that’s it. You don’t like it?”

“No, never,” she said.

In the bedroom, he opened the cupboard door.

She was learning what to expect. “You can see the tops of all the clothes hangers, and every item on the shelf.”

He nodded, quiet now.

She cleared her throat. “Show me my bed.”

He turned and walked her to the edge of her bed, the only piece of furniture in the flat that was brand new. It was the largest bed she’d ever owned, bought for him as much as for her. Even so, when he laid on it, his feet settled against the foot-board and he had to tilt diagonally.

She lay beside him, her cheek on his chest, his heart drumming against her ear. She began with a sigh. “Everything I have, every piece I’ve gathered to build my life -- it’s all smaller and shabbier to you than I ever imagined.” 

He propped himself up on his elbows, looking at her. “Is that what you think I’ve been showing you?”

“Wasn’t it?”

He fell back against the pillows, cradling her head in his arms. “Everything you have is smaller and sweeter than you ever imagined. It’s marvelous that you can make room inside your miniatures for something like me.”

She nestled closer to him. “It isn’t. You belong here. It’s not a sacrifice.”

“No, it’s not a sacrifice,” he agreed. “But it is a paradox. The difference between our sizes -- it wouldn’t work for everyone, but for us, nothing could be better. It’s a paradox that you and me could be a perfect fit after everything mismatched in our backgrounds, our histories, our sizes -- after all the ways we make no sense.”

He eased her along his side, pulling her upward, until they were face to face. “And there’s a word for that kind of paradox, Hermione. It’s ‘miracle.’ You and me are miracle.” 

He smoothed her hair behind her ear and as he brought his hand back into her view, like a Muggle sleight of hand trick, there was a ring between his fingers, emerald and platinum.

“We are a miracle,” he said again. “And this is the proposal.”

She moved, but not for the ring. She had taken a fistful of his jumper and was pulling him toward herself. It was a signal for him to roll on top of her. In the mirror hung on the back of the door, near the foot of the bed, she all but disappeared, just two hands on either side of his head, holding him as she kissed him -- warm and deep, covering every millimetre of his lips, three times, three thousand times more in love with him than she knew she was moments before. 

She lifted her hand between them, fingers splayed so he could slide the ring into place.

“Draco Malfoy,” she said, “will you marry me?”

He smiled into her face, and told her, “Yes.”


End file.
